Biologically Meaningful Keywords for Functional Terms of the Functional Basis

Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a retrieval algorithm was developed to identify potential biologically meaningful keywords that are more effective in searching biological text than corresponding engineering keywords. In our current work, we applied and refined the retrieval algorithm to translate functional terms of the functional basis into biologically meaningful keywords. The functional basis is widely accepted as a standardized representation of engineering product functionality. Therefore, our keywords could serve as a thesaurus for engineers to find biological analogies relevant to their design problems. We also describe specific semantic relationships that can be used to identify biologically meaningful keywords in excerpts describing biological phenomena. These semantic relations were applied as criteria to identify the most useful biologically meaningful keywords. Through a preliminary validation experiment, we observed that different translators were able to apply the criteria to identify biologically meaningful keywords with a high degree of agreement to those identified by the authors. In addition, we describe how fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering students used the biologically meaningful keywords to develop concepts for their design projects. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003249

[1]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Systematicity as a Selection Constraint in Analogical Mapping , 1991, Cogn. Sci..

[2]  Ashok K. Goel.  Design, Analogy, and Creativity , 1997, IEEE Expert.

[3]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Development of a Functional Basis for Design , 2000 .

[4]  Nathalie Bonnardel,et al.  Towards understanding and supporting creativity in design: analogies in a constrained cognitive environment , 2000, Knowl. Based Syst..

[5]  L. H. Shu,et al.  TOWARDS BIOMIMETIC CONCEPT GENERATION , 2001 .

[6]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Biomimetic Concept Generation Applied to Design for Remanufacture , 2002 .

[7]  Simon Szykman,et al.  A functional basis for engineering design: Reconciling and evolving previous efforts , 2002 .

[8]  K.K.B. Hon,et al.  Knowledge Brokering for Assisting the Generation of Automotive Product Design , 2004 .

[9]  Amaresh Chakrabarti,et al.  A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas , 2005, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[10]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Bridging Cross-Domain Terminology for Biomimetic Design , 2005 .

[11]  D. Rebholz-Schuhmann,et al.  Facts from Text—Is Text Mining Ready to Deliver? , 2005, PLoS biology.

[12]  Hans Nørgaard Hansen,et al.  Case Study in Biomimetic Design: Handling and Assembly of Microparts , 2006 .

[13]  J. Vincent,et al.  Biomimetics: its practice and theory , 2006, Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

[14]  Yoseph Bar-Cohen,et al.  Biomimetics—using nature to inspire human innovation , 2006, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[15]  David W. Rosen,et al.  Systematic Reverse Engineering of Biological Systems , 2007 .

[16]  Ying Liu,et al.  Using WordNet to Disambiguate Word Senses for Text Classification , 2007, International Conference on Computational Science.

[17]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Biomimetic design through natural language analysis to facilitate cross-domain information retrieval , 2007, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[18]  Thomas J. Howard,et al.  Creative Stimulation in Conceptual Design: An Analysis of Industrial Case Studies , 2008 .

[19]  Ashok K. Goel,et al.  Compound Analogical Design: Interaction between Problem Decomposition and Analogical Transfer in Biologically Inspired Design , 2008 .

[20]  L. Shu,et al.  Using descriptions of biological phenomena for idea generation , 2008 .

[21]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  The role of timing and analogical similarity in the stimulation of idea generation in design , 2008 .

[22]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Innovations in Design Through Transformation: A Fundamental Study of Transformation Principles , 2009 .

[23]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Effective Analogical Transfer Using Biological Descriptions Retrieved With Functional and Biologically Meaningful Keywords , 2009 .